What is Personal Branding (and How Can You Make Yours Better)?

If you’ve ever watched Schitt’s Creek, you know how character David Rose feels about branding. “Uh, so I was just verbally assaulted by a very off-brand customer in line outside,” he once said. Both professional and personal branding aren’t just important to David Rose, they are vital to the success (or failure) of many, many real people. 

Yet, for as important as personal branding on social media is, there are a startling number of celebrities who seem to overlook or misunderstand its value. For example, Amanda Bynes has posted some sexually graphic (and gross) comments via social media. Lily James and Justin Bieber were blasted for culturally insensitive Instagram posts. Floyd Merriweather, Adam Rapaport, Hartley Sawyer, and Rosanne Barr let loose with racially inappropriate comments on their social media accounts. 

From these celebrity cautionary tales (and others), we’ve seen how detrimental bad online content can be to not only building a brand on social media, but also destroying it—and, sometimes irrevocably ruining careers in the process. 

But, you don’t have to be a celebrity to damage your personal brand. So, in an effort to create an impressive, clean, and creative social media personal brand, perhaps we should follow the lead of David Rose by being hypervigilant in personal brand-building in this New Year of 2021.  And, LifeBrand can help you with this. Our online management reputation technology can scan and flag your social media platforms for posts that may work against (instead of for) your personal brand. 

What is Personal Branding (and How Can You Make Yours Better)?

You may wonder what the difference is between your professional and personal brand. Honestly, they aren’t necessarily autonomous—your personal brand is often a reflection of your professional pursuits. Building your personal brand online essentially serves as a means of sharing your strengths and skill sets, while also establishing credibility in your “space.” 

Just as there are ways to completely nail social media branding (which we’ll get to shortly), there are, as we mentioned earlier, examples of how to completely destroy your personal branding, which include:

• Racist comments and images

• Sexist or misogynist posts

• Ethnically insensitive and incorrect content

• Homophobic rants

• Sexually explicit and distasteful comments

• Excessive use of profanity

• Pictures of illegal substances, being intoxicated

All of the above have and will continue to be personal-brand destroyers for many. 

Now, let’s look at ways to cultivate a personal brand and following on social media:

• Define your purpose by posting content and images that match your ideals, passion, mission, product, service (i.e. if you are an aspiring artist, post images of your artwork, what has inspired your artwork, and other artists you admire).

• Post consistently to help boost the credibility we talked about earlier. If you don’t, then you may lose followers who question your authenticity.

• Cross-promote other talented people in your industry to show your followers that you are not narcissistic (by only posting about yourself), while also showcasing your knowledge of your space—for example, if you’re an artist, mention/tag fellow artists.

• Take regular inventory of your posts to ensure they don’t violate any of the personal-branding destroyers from the list above!

• Clean any discovered personal-brand blemishing posts

How Can You Find and Fix Posts That Harm Your Personal Branding? 

At LifeBrand, we help people improve their personal brand with our innovative social media scanning technology. Our reputation management software (run by Artificial Intelligence) flags any posts that can be considered damaging to your personal brand and lets you curate your past content to suit your social media brand (we find an average of 33 per scan!)

Be on your way to the new you: Get a Free Scan Today!